Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy

“Battaglia threw me out of the trial I was handling,” I said, confused by the tender tone of Mike’s voice. The sentiment was familiar, but he was softer and calm, not baiting me as he always did in front of the cops. “I told you that.”

“Then sit behind your desk and write a brief, for Chrissakes. Analyze the latest Court of Appeals decisions. Break some defense attorney’s chops.”

“What is it you don’t want me to see today?”

“It’s gonna get to you, kid. It gets to every one of us sooner or later. The street has a way of settling in your gut like a malignancy, small at first, then spreading till it infiltrates every pore in your body. It’s not just about today. Not just this case.”

He let go and I thought for a second that he was going to touch my face, cup my chin between his fingers. “I understand that, Mike. I’ve seen my friends, our friends—”

“But you think you’re different, is that it?”

“Not for a minute. There’s nobody here but us, you know? You don’t have to make me the butt of your jokes. Take out your frustration on something else.”

“Trust me, Coop. I’m not frustrated. You’d be the last to know about that.” He turned away from me and opened the faucet, splashing some cold water on his face. The moment had passed and now the edge was back in his voice. “You’ve got some kryptonite coating that protects all this shit from creeping into your soul and your brain and that underutilized thing you call your heart? You think you’re immune from it?”

“Not in the least. You asked for my help last night. I started out with you because you thought I had something to give you.”

“My mistake,” he said, wiping his face with a piece of paper towel. “I didn’t guess I’d be dragging you into what came next.”

I wanted to reach up and straighten the lock of hair that had lodged itself below his shirt collar at the nape of his neck, but when he stood, it fell into place. The line between my annoyance at his sniping and the affection that had grown for years was pencil-thin. “I might surprise you, Mike. Maybe I can help with the bigger picture.”

“Then saddle up, Coop. Let’s see if you can cross-examine a severed head.”

FOURTEEN

MIKE’S estimate of how long it would take us to get uptown was off by half an hour. The circuitous route from the narrow one-way streets of lower Manhattan, up the FDR Drive, and across the width of the island to West 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue seemed to take an eternity in traffic that was snarled and tangled despite the lone siren of our unimpressive Crown Vic.

The area around the Church of St. John the Divine — the largest cathedral in the world, set on thirteen acres of land — was already cordoned off with police tape and a phalanx of uniformed cops who had established a perimeter. This time, reporters and photographers had beaten us to the scene and were angling for a gruesome money shot, the sort they had missed at Mount Neboh less than sixteen hours earlier.

Mike double-parked the car on Amsterdam, and in an uncharacteristic display of patience, waited for me to catch up with him before approaching the barricade of wooden horses and yellow police tape. It wasn’t chivalry — he usually threw himself headlong into the mix with no concern for my whereabouts — but rather the fact that I’d explained my connection to the cathedral as we crawled through the late-afternoon traffic.

“Which way?”

I pointed to the right, and he shoved the stanchion aside to make room for both of us to pass through. “The sculpture garden,” I said. “The Fountain of Peace.”

My mother, Maude, raised on a dairy farm in Massachusetts by her Scandinavian parents, was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and had been bused with her teenage classmates to this grand hybrid of Romanesque and French Gothic design for that ceremony. She had never forgotten the elegance of its architecture, so we came often in my youth to admire the 601-foot nave, the Great Rose Window made of ten thousand pieces of colored glass, and the stunning procession of thirty-two limestone matriarchs and patriarchs — Abraham and Sarah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ishmael and Hagar — who now appeared to be frowning down at Mike and me as we jogged beneath the Portal of Paradise to circle the massive building.

The cloistered park, usually swarming with children and their mothers and nannies, was a sea of NYPD blue. It looked as though all the civilians had been chased from the area.

A sharp voice yelled “Chapman,” and off to the side I could see Ray Peterson, standing on a bench to oversee the operation and waving us to approach.

“Sorry it took so long, Loo,” Mike said. “What’d I miss?”

Mike extended a hand and Peterson stepped down, crushing the end of the burning butt that he tossed from his mouth as he did. Then he picked it up and pocketed it so his team didn’t mistake it for something the killer left behind. “There’s gonna be a couple of toddlers with nightmares for months to come.”

“Who found the head? You’re saying kids?”

The lieutenant extracted another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “Put something in a bright yellow backpack with cartoon characters and smiley faces all over it and what child wouldn’t glom onto it?”

“Who’s got it now?”

“ESU. Katie Cion wedged through the fencing to retrieve the bag. She’s hangin’ here for dear life to see you, Chapman. Won’t give it up to Crime Scene or the medical examiner. You got some motley harem is all I can say.” Peterson inhaled and started marching us toward the center of the circle of cops. He was pushing sixty-two, grizzled and slightly stooped, with the smell of tobacco well saturated into every piece of clothing he owned, especially the polyester suits that were standard for cops of his generation. “Like to know your secret.”

“If I told you I’d have to kill you, Loo. Katie Cion’s a sucker for my sensitivity. That a fact, Coop?”

The Emergency Services Unit was as exclusive a group of cops as you could find anywhere in the world. They pulled despondent jumpers off the cables of the city’s tallest bridges, rescued infants from abandoned elevator shafts, dragged crazies from precarious window ledges, managed the most dangerous hostage situations, and in Katie’s case, once safely maneuvered a corpse from the bottom of an antique city well while dangling upside down, supported by the partners she trusted daily with her life. She was courageous, cool, and clever, all packed in a pint-size police uniform.

“Sounds right to me. She’s only human.” I let Peterson lead because he was known to everyone at the scene. The men and women who were working the small park in a grid formation, scouring the ground and bushes and paved pathways for any traces of evidence, briskly stepped aside for the lieutenant. He was universally respected for his decades of experience and vast knowledge of the workings of the most complex homicide investigations in the city.

“Mike says you know this place fairly well.”

“Social visits and a few funerals.” The cornerstone was laid in 1892, but even to this day the construction of the great building was barely two-thirds completed. Its design was the customary cathedral shape of a cross, crowned at the crossing by a towering spire, with a main altar surrounded by seven Chapels of the Tongues to represent the growing immigrant masses in nineteenth-century New York. Despite early financing by wealthy trustees like J. P. Morgan, the ambitious project ran out of funding somewhere along the way. “Saint John the Unfinished is what my mother calls it.”

“I’d laugh, Alex, but the scaffolding around the base of the church serves too well to conceal anybody who wants to lurk around here at night. It’s dark and massive, and it’s sheltering in ways that I don’t think the Good Lord had in mind.”

I spotted Katie Cion thirty feet ahead, holding court with one of the ME’s death investigators and a few of her ESU colleagues.

“Scrape up that gum,” Peterson shouted to a detective who was using the toe of his highly polished leather shoe to poke around a patch of damp sod. “Get on your knees and bag that chewing gum, Gonsalves. You got a good dry cleaner, the grass stains will come out.”

“It’s a friggin’ playground, Loo. You want DNA from the gum? We got a vat full already. We got a whole kindergarten class ready to upload in the databank. The saliva of a future generation of moguls, memorialized in the city lab. You think we need more?” The dapper Benny Gonsalves bent down and probed at something with his pen.

“If I don’t see dirt on your pants by the end of the day, don’t even think about putting in for overtime.”

Mike had passed the lieutenant and walked directly over to Katie Cion, who was explaining what had happened as we caught up to him.

“A pack of five-year-olds, you know what I mean? A couple of the moms were off to the side, yakking about Botox or something serious like that.” Katie paused to greet me but kept right on talking. “One of the kids got frisky and started to climb into the bowl of the fountain while nobody had an eye on her.”

It was still too cold and windy for the four strong heads of the fountain to be opened for the spring season. Then, they would shoot steady streams of water into the air to cascade over the pedestal, merging and foaming into a maelstrom meant to evoke the primordial chaos of the earth.

Rainwater, dirt, and small bits of garbage had pooled in the base of the giant sculpture. “The kid didn’t mind stepping in this muck,” Katie said. “She had her eye on that backpack.”

“Was it just sitting there on the edge?” I asked.

“Nope. It was out of reach, beyond the wooden gate that was erected around the inner circumference, probably for the purpose of keeping people away. She got her skinny little arm right through the slats and pulled it close. Got enough of a glimpse to scream bloody murder.”

We were losing the late-afternoon sunlight to the west, behind the tall buildings. The enormous wings of the sculpted figure above our heads cast a bizarre shadow.

“Who’s the flying dude?” Mike asked as Katie’s gloved hands reached to unwrap the backpack, which was covered with a tarp, under the watchful eyes of the death investigator and the ESU team.

“The Archangel Michael,” I said.

“Ah, leading the heavenly host against the forces of evil. The Bible told me so. Guess he was asleep at the wheel last night. Show me what you got, Katie.”

I was nervous, averting my eyes from the tarp and studying the figures on the sculpture that rose above the fountain, remembering from my youthful visits that its many images celebrated the triumph of good over evil.

“It’s not a coincidence our killer picked this church, either,” I said.

Mike had gloved up, too, and was crouched next to Katie, ready to look at what she had. “What do you mean?”

“That’s the Archangel’s sword,” I said, pointing at the weapon extending from his hand, and following the tip of it with my finger. “He’s vanquished his enemy.”

“Keep it coming, Coop,” Mike said, parting the zippered pouch of the backpack to look in.

“Satan. He’s just decapitated Satan. There’s the devil’s head, dangling beneath the crab’s claw.”

Our killer hadn’t discarded his trophy. He had placed it in this spot to make a statement.

It was a full minute before Mike spoke to me. He stood up, one hand brushing his dark hair back as he often did when he was agitated, the other planted on his hip.

“Here’s the rest of your vic, kid. You wanted the whole experience, didn’t you?”

He stepped back and Katie Cion offered me up the backpack like it held something inside that I might actually want to see. I steadied myself and met the sightless stare of the pale, waxen, bloodied face of Naomi Gersh.

FIFTEEN

“YOU couldn’t have two more different institutions,” Peterson said. “Mount Neboh and Saint John the Divine. But they’re really just a stone’s throw away from each other. We’re two blocks south—”

“A few broad avenues west and in between them lies one of the most dangerous strips in the city,” Mike said, referring to Morning-side Park. “Not the most direct route I’d expect someone to take, escaping with a body part.”

“Hey, it’s all Harlem.”

The ME’s office workers had taken over the process of removing the backpack and the possible evidence that had been found around it. Most of the detectives paused and stood silently as Naomi’s remains were carried out of their circle and packed into the van.

“Don’t let any of the folks who send their kids to Columbia hear you call this neighborhood Harlem,” Mike said, wagging a finger at Peterson. “They plunk down the big bucks for a college education they think is in a genteel part of town called Morningside Heights.”

The Columbia University campus continued to expand and swallow up most of the surrounding area, between its academic buildings and real estate bought up for student housing. It suffered the crime problems of most urban schools — the town-gown dichotomy — but the overwhelming number of criminal cases that came to my attention from the Columbia campus were actually date and acquaintance rapes between kids who knew one another, usually fueled by drugs and alcohol.

“Call it what you want, Chapman, this here’s still Harlem. You’re just lucky her head didn’t wind up at the bottom of the Hudson. Zip. Nada. Nothing to work with then.”

Having seen the gruesome discovery, I wasn’t sure what clues this find would yield. “Don’t you think the choice of crime scenes is a more important focus right now, while the lab works up some forensics? Why these churches? Like Mike said, there’s nothing random about this.”

“What she’s really thinking, Loo, is what’s a nice Jewish girl doing in a place like this? Maybe a not-so-nice girl. Think of that angle.”

“I figured for certain the tabloids would start blaming the victim before you did.”

“Motive?” Peterson asked, using the embers of his cigarette to light the next one. “You’re already writing your closing argument, Alexandra. We’ll never get there till we find this bastard.”

We had lost the sunlight altogether now, as shadows lowered themselves down the sides of the cathedral and over the somber faces of the disapproving martyrs and prophets. Beyond the yellow lines of police tape, the gawkers were dispersing as some of the medical personnel and uniformed cops left the scene.

I shielded my eyes with my hand, spotting a familiar face as a man emerged from a yellow cab on Amsterdam. He headed directly toward the entrance of the cathedral, through the gold-plated doors of the main portal. “Mike, isn’t that Wilbur Gaskin? The guy from Mount Neboh, last night?”

“Good eye, blondie,” Mike said, taking off after him. “Hold that thought, Loo.”